Are you an IBM Lotus business partner who will be in town (Boston) on July 11th? Maybe you are a Microsoft business partner attending the Velocity 2006 conference in Boston? Want to figure out a better way to partner? with IBM Lotus?

Organizations and individuals that store their data in ODF XML avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out- of- business, raises its prices, changes its software, or changes alters its licensing terms.

The OASIS OpenDocument Format for Office Applications V1.0 (known simply as ODF), was submitted for fast track approval by the ISO/IEC international standards organizations in 4Q/2005. The submission was balloted this week (May 1, 2006) as an International Standard in ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee on Information Technology. See http://www.odfalliance.org/press/AllianceRelease3May06.pdf . The new international standard has been given the designation, ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF V1.0). ISO/IEC 26300 was approved by ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, subcommittee SC 34, Document description and processing languages.

The standard will continue to be maintained and advanced by the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee and the recently formed OASIS ODF Adoption Committee, both of which remain open to participation from users, suppliers, government agencies, and individuals.

Is the state of Massachusetts biased against proprietary software makers? I don't know -- although under the circumstances, it sounds like a good idea to me.

To understand why, you'll first have to parse this bit of sophistry, which comes courtesy of Melanie Wyne, the executive director of the Institute for Software Choice:

"The RFP reveals that the choice presented by the previous ITD [Massachusetts Division of Technology] bureaucrats. i.e., ODF-compliant desktops for state agencies are the only viable options for citizens to have access to their data in the future, was purposely exclusionary, being primarily designed to distort the competitive landscape.

"In other words, it had little to do with access to documents, and everything to do with excluding proprietary software providers.

" Wyne clearly (or, perhaps, not so clearly- that first sentence is a doozie) does not like the fact that Massachusetts went shopping for a plug-in capable of converting Office documents to the open-source ODF format. Nor is she pleased that the state issued its RFP for such a plugin just two days after ISO approved ODF as a bona fide open standard. ..."

Just because Microsoft is beating the standards drum doesn't mean that it is planning to ramp up its standards involvement, however, Robertson cautioned.

"You can achieve interoperability in a number of ways," said Robertson. Among them: joint collaboration agreements, technology licensing and interoperability pacts. "Standards are not always appropriate," Robertson said. And in the cases in which they are, "you should standardize only what is necessary."

Some questions to ask Microsoft:

Will there still be proprietary extensions within the Microsoft XML implementation that are known only to Microsoft and keep the implementation from being fully open and will the format include macros that call on proprietary application?

Are there intellectual property constraints which would preclude or make difficult the adoption of this technology as a truly open standard?

Are there licensing terms which would preclude implementation by the open source community?

Why will it be 18 months before developers will be able to get the full specification from ECMA and if that is due to ECMA's process why doesn't Microsoft release it to the public before hand?

Finally, what will happen "post" standard process? Who will be in charge of the evolution of the standard? One proprietary vendor or the industry?

"many companies, government agencies, and educational institutions canchuck at least some of them. Those based on XP -- or Windows 2000,which still has a huge installed base in government agencies -- canlook to big savings on licensing, hardware, and training costs."

From guest blogger Scott Handy, Vice President of Linux and Open Source at IBM:

We announced at Linuxworld, eight key open source initiatives beyond Linux, aimed at accelerating the adoption of open standards and extending existing product lines to reach new customers. We also announced new work with the open source community to improve the development of general Linux kernel functionality, expanding its Linux focus around virtualization, Cell processor technologies, and security.

The eight new disciplines focusing on open source business opportunities include:

Grid Computing - Expanded support for Open Grid Services Architecture and the Globus Alliance.

IBM Research/Business Consulting and Technology Services - Enabling customers to innovate with open source-based solutions and development models.

Brazilian-based online gaming pioneer Hoplon Infotainment, Nationwide Insurance, CommX, and RealPlus, are among those pushing the company's estimated number of Linux-related customer engagements to more than 15,000 worldwide.

Customers using supercomputers, to gaming technologies and desktops and mobile phones are benefiting from the low cost of ownership, security, and reliability of Linux and open source software running on standards-based IBM hardware and server platforms. The company is particularly committed to expanding growth in IBM's Linux-related customer engagements in emerging markets

including Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Hoplon Infotainment, for instance, is beta testing its new massive multi-player TaikoDom game hosted on an IBM mainframe computer at the IBM Service Delivery Center in Hortolandia, Brazil managing purchasing transactions with WebSphere and DB2 database software running on Linux. Millions of players worldwide can challenge each other in online games like TaikoDom and interact with other users in real time requiring a highly scalable IT infrastructure. The IBM DB2 Universal Database solution running on Linux delivered a significant percent performance increase over an Oracle solution that previously served as the technology middleware.

Developers appear to be shifting away from Microsoft Windows to Linux and Mac OSX for their development operating system. 26.9% of respondents cite Linux was as primary desktop operating system, representing a 7 percentage point increase from 2007. Though Windows is still the dominant development OS at 64%, it has decreased 10 percentage points from 2007. The most popular Linux variant of choice among developers is Ubuntu, which accounts for over half of Linux respondents. Mac OSX has increase to 6.9% from 3.5% in 2007.

Linux is taking an increase share of the deployment operating system environment. 42.7% of the respondents selected Linux as their deployment environment; an increase from 37% in 2007. Ubuntu (12%) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (10.2%) are the leading Linux distros.

Per a recent Forrester report, only 11% of the 61 will definitely renew Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. 26% have decided NOT to renew. 86% (more than 3000 user organizations) have the agreement up for renewal in 2007.

"Julie Giera, the Forrester Research vice president who wrote the report, said she speaks with hundreds of Microsoft Software Assurance customers each year, and the findings from the formal study are consistent with what she has been hearing from many of them."

We are coming across many customers wanting to move their ASP.Net/VB applications to J2EE. The trend is distinct in Financial sector in general and Insurance industry in particular. Many of them are embracing WebSphere Portal, as the aggregation point of information and applications, for role based execution of business processes. The recently announced Mainsoft solution suits this purpose.

Now Microsoft is offering to pay bloggers money to "correct" Wikipedia articles about the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML)!

As you know Microsoft has been hotly pursuing ISO to see if OOXML can be standarized. However, some argue that OOXML is not really "open" (http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections ) and with ODF, the world already has an ISO standard that works and is open, independent of Microsoft's proprietary technology.

So what does Microsoft do to combat the growing global momentum behind ODF? They offer to pay bloggers to "correct" Wikipedia entries about ODF!